advance his ambition of. >> host: the book is jfk and the senate. [applause] thank you for that lovely introduction. and also for coming out on a school might. i know how hard it is to do that if you have kids or not. also for postdate this event i would like to make a quick plug if you have any changes in your pocket by a book to support your local independent bookstore. it is a great option but you

don't have to buy my book. [laughter] i have three short excerpts i would like to read it for you tonight that i thought we could have a discussion. has anyone actually read the book yet? some people have started some people have finished. so just to give context the format is a bit unusual. is a category stretcher written primarily as save them more a very personal story about my experience trying coming trying, trying everything i could think of to balance a demanding career and motherhood and

allied completely and utterly failed but then i try to make sense of that failure to put it a bigger context with the idea to turn this into a book where started to hear from other web and the word eerily similar to mine and i realized how max out we all are and i wanted to understand it is a bigger way. it is a memoir butted each chapter i tried to include an essay where i take on a seed from the chapter. i will start to in the middle in the beginning of the books i had a baby girl and a stepdaughter was a toddler and i started a big management job at a

consulting firm and web design firm in san francisco i've loved everything but i was completely wracked with guilt and was struggling almost from the beginning but over the years i figured it out i thought how to put my guilts and naboth size to a class is on anxiety management and sees things did help me but then i had another baby. so this takes place after i return from maternity leave with the new baby and two older kids. >> although i was working only four days a week we had one child more. we were both moving as fast as we could but yet a certain task was not getting done.

one was behind on immunizations i needed do classism your overdue for a trip to the dentist and america had a school play the same day as the parent teacher conference. when were we supposed to make time for this part of living a normal life but did not seem to fit into our normal life. somebody has to pick up the dry cleaning or get the oil changed to organize family photos, plan birthday parties, rsvp to other parties, wrap them a gift and shop around for insurance, stock the earthquake kits and baked brownies for the pot luck luck, go to swim lessons lessons, please send the ince, by a coach and return

overdue library books, chaperone the field trip and pay the bills. the work obligations that fell outside of work hours to do dinner, schmoose out-of-town clients clients, networking events and launch party some of which we hosted that our office. there was bad form to miss them. but for brian there was invoicing and accounting negotiating contracts, learning new software, and other business related tasks for which he did not get paid. luckily beaver consultants it was our job to plan and execute difficult projects. what we need is said good project plan confident this would fix our problem. each sunday night after the kids went to bet we would hunker down to create our plan for the week.

we listed everything that needed to get done and decided which was top priority then made in a weber it spreadsheet to divide each day into his and her 30 minute increments. is specified to every kirsch three shopping trip and work meetings that were expected to run early or stay late in those networking events. and in the effort to stay healthy there is time to work out and see friends. this schedule even included tonya to create the next week's schedule to people out one half hour time slot and was color-coded by a

category and took up half of the refrigerator. looking at it filled me with hope. i can do it all. but dread of not a moment to spare. on paper there is time for everything as long as nothing went wrong. of course, things did go wrong. the car got a flat, a friend would ask for a favor, the water heater broke and flooded the floor. when it happens it is like the proverbial butterfly effected cause the hurricane. one wrong move could set off a chain of events causing a whole schedule to collapse for the worst was when one of us got sick because chances were all of us would get sick that means stock in the house for a week or more getting bored we did

everything humanly possible. we took daley multi vitamins. in to get to allergy shots at the slightest hint of a local level given verbal remedies and homeopathic remedies to boost the immune system. we took the of grown up a version. one entire shelf in the kitchen packets of the emergency and tubes of airborne and things i could barely pronounced like i still can't. we avoided sugar because it compromises the immune system we've got to brown rice and a whole grain bread. who i would sprinkle yeast on the yogurt and for a

special treat i would let them let the power right of the spoon. we would cancel play dates if anybody felt slightly warm and our friends did the same. every working parent we knew was terrified of terms. we washed hands as if we had a zero cd but then i would carry antibacterial wipes in my purse. i eyed every doorknob dan bannister with suspicion and the flash public with its with my flood -- flat and worse and howard hughes but yet after jake started day care and i returned to to work we got sick and the second a sick again. chest colds. unexplained fevers the last five days, rashers down the bellies and down the arms. had lice that would only

affect one of the kids but everybody in the family would have to be treated to wash every shirt trouble and she in blanket in the house. martha got the stomach flu in the middle of the night i will apologize ahead of time if you just ate dinner. she did not get any farther than the top of her book bet where she vomited like a sprinkler head managing to hit all four walls of her bedroom. really. all four of them it could that has been easy. the last thing she had eaten was an entire pint of strawberries and looked as if a dying animal had run around the room bleeding on every surface. bronchitis. sinus infection. pinkeye. walking pneumonia, asthma attacks, strokes throat, pooping cough? whooping cough? the disease that was

supposed to be eradicated? yes that won both jake and bright and got its that earned a house call from two very controlled and nurses from cdc they shut down the day care for a week even after he was well enough to go back he could not. and in three months we best 10 days of work between us. if there rest of the year turned out to be like this we would miss more than 40 days. how could this be? i have six paid six-- per year generous considered half of america does not have any but it was not close to covering the needs of the kids when they're sick. of course, i could always use vacation but i needed that to cover professional development days at school.

i ask the pediatrician for advice she was in her 50s and had seen it all. i trusted her. why do we keep getting sick i asked? what are we doing wrong? she said this as normal as she put her stethoscope in the pocket. children on average get between eight and 10 colds per-share. >> per year? per child? it was absurd yet consistent with everything we had experienced. i did the math at home. on average your kid has to be home from school one day per illness some did require any but others could not out of reach easy nine-- her kid

per year. if you have two kids if they overlap by half that means an average of 13 days off per year to be home with a sick kid. some years better and others worse but of course, that does not include the days when you are sick no matter how many smoothies you drink if you are up all night with a sick kid you are bound to get a. my role was to never take a sick day for myself unless i with throwing up my frequent sniffles garnered sympathy and the steep dive. they wanted to say why did you give us your terms? because they cannot afford to take a sick day i have three kids. this was a silent

conversation we carried out in my head. often when one of the kids was sec we worked from home. it was generous but face it it sucks to field conference calls on you too well the feverish child is on the couch to feel that you neglect your child but you let your co-workers down also. i will stop there. >> the sicknesses went on and other things happened. i'd like to read a sidebar s.a. -- s.a. because we are in the silicon valley. i would like to read about productivity. this is an issue in almost every industry but in particular with high-tech

companies, financial firms, all across silicon valley with digital agencies israel culture of sacrifice. a cultural expectation beyond anything writed in the employee handbook. . .

productivity and employees. since your boss probably hasn't read the story and the chances are you're still stuck like so many americans working 50 or more hours a week and about leaves you very little time to leave anything accept this but i will share the highlights. most people assume if you increase your hours by say 50%, you will get 50% more than, not true. study after study shows that for industrial workers, productivity dramatically decreases after eight hours a day. knowledge workers, people like me and most of my friends have only six good hours of productivity at a. after that we are cooked noodles. studies show after companies reduce workers hours back down to 40 a week am of your business has become -- and this is a

quote -- significantly more productive and profitable. sometimes there are short-term gains when people work 60 or so than tv to cope more hours a week however as the article points out the risk of burnout is after one week. and this is an article from the quote without adequate rest and recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, some people get stupid and can't focus and they spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off and they do working. if they make mistakes that they never make if they were rested and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they are fried. some software teams do send them to a negative progress mode where they are actually losing ground week after week because they are so mentally exhausted the theater make him more errors than they can fix. despite 150 years of research, proving that long hours is bad

for everyone, americans still work some of the longest hours of every country in the industrialized world. shouldn't we know better? by the antisocial workaholic software programmers in silicon valley who were upheld for their passion and not working on the weekends was terribly old-fashioned but most of us whether we have children or not cannot work this way. so, negative productivity mode that is the term you have to tell your boss that you have to explain why you are going home at five. so one of the reasons that i wrote this book and why i felt my story had something to contribute to this conversation about women and work is because i think that there is an inordinate amount of discussion

put on women's personal choices. i think that whenever the conversation comes up about having it all work leaning in or opting out or women in poverty it goes back to it's your choice to work or not work. and i think that what we are missing and what the media is missing is that this is actually a public health issue when you are hopefully by the end of this book you have read enough research and enough stories to see that the u.s. has a terrible lack of support for the working families who are at the bottom of the list of developed countries and we also have a cultural goblin that goes beyond policy. but this isn't just making people unhappy. it's actually making a lot of us sick. and so i would like to read this last excerpt from late in the book i'm at chapter 23 which starts when i stopped working.

i wish i could tell you i could find job, took a few weeks to recuperate and emerged refreshed and ready to embrace a new chapter in my life. if i had a quick seven months earlier, that might have happened. maybe if i had hit the reset button before the ghastly winter, before april, those were two difficult clients we had at work, perhaps i would have just quietly stepped away from my career like so many other moms i knew. this is what happened instead. the first few days after i stopped working, cried constantly. i woke up in the middle of the night shaking, heart pounding unable to go back to sleep. i imagined myself as a car that had run out of gas. i just needed to refuel, but the days turned into weeks -- they

are comfy ambulances for me. but the days turned into weeks and i wasn't getting any better. i haven't run out of gas. i had run out of oil. my machinery had ground against itself and fused. if you could have lifted my hood, thick smoke would have bellowed out. i continue to cry on the couch. sometimes i would move from the couch to my bed where i stared at the leaves in our backyard. when the wind blew through the branches, the underside of the leaves looked silver blue like entrancing like watching goldfish swimming in a bowl always moving but never going anywhere. brian had started a new project. every few hours come he took a break from his work to come inside, stroke my hair and a set of reassuring things like your home, everything is going to be okay. you just need a long rest he

said over and over. he was remarkably upbeat considering that his wife had just lost her mind. the tension that has steadily grown between us since i started back full-time had evaporated to be that there was nothing to fight it ou off anymore. it was as if brian had been expecting this and now that i had finally collapsed it was a relief to him. now there was something he could do. for starters, he could take care of the kids. the cruel irony. i had yearned for years to have more time with my children. now that i finally have time, being around them was a torment. i felt as if my ears would bleed from their happy squeals. i love them of course i never stopped loving them into being their mother but all he wanted was to lie down alone in silence. i wanted one of those tanks with

no light and no sound, so quiet that the silence itself became a noise. i would live there until every thought stopped, until i was as relaxed as a boiled egg noodles and still i wouldn't move. i would stay until it was good and board. i haven't been bored in years. it sounded like such a luxury. i would go on lying there in my dark silence will tank until the landscape grew and it started to rain in the desert until i felt the rustle o of wildlife and the birds began a new song, an untii thought completely whole image zooinhuman and alive again. how long i wondered would that take? i made an appointment with my psychiatrist a few days after i stopped working. i haven't seen her in five years

since ruby was a baby. this time i wasn't going to sign up for any classes. i wanted to be fixed once and for all. i wanted her to pull a high-tech vacuum cleaner out from underneath her desk and pull the misery right out from underneath me. absent that i was pretty sure that i wanted to trucks. she looked exactly the same as i had remembered her, short curly hair and that's pleasantly asymmetrical days. after quickly listing my symptoms like a truck stop waitress reciting the specials, i got to the point. i'm quitting my job, i said that i leaned back against the fabric of the couch. that is, sort of. i'm on a leave of absence. i was planning to seven months ago but then the economy tanked so i stayed. i think i just got really burned

out. she mirrored her eyes and audit almost imperceptibly. yes, that's what it sounds like. i shifted forward again. what is happening to me? am i having a nervous breakdown? i hadn't said that phrase out loud before, but as soon as i did come it sounded perfectly right and strangely hopeful. serious eats temporary. something i would get through, not something i had to live with. reflecting on it later i could see that it also implied catharsis, and internal act of rebellion against the status quo like my spirit was going on strike to protest at the constant mindless activity of my body. well, we couldn't call it a breakdown, that's not a medical term. what would you call it? she looked down at my file for several seconds and then back at

me. you may have a depression and anxiety disorder. often people who are depressed have anxiety that you may have both. i have two disorders, i said? i didn't like the sound of this. i still don't. nervous breakdown may not be an accepted medical term but it described and events. doctor light was describing a pathology. she ran her index finger down a page of my files and looked up again. how do you feel about going on antidepressants? now we were getting somewhere. she could call it whatever she wants as long as she needed to go a way. will they makwill they make me i asked? many people find that they are quite effective at relieving anxiety and depression. her tone reminded me of the disclaimers each year at the end of the rogue commercials. individual results may vary.

she hadn't really answered my question but then what did i expect her to say yes, they will fix you right up. i would like to start you on a new drug, she continued. it's a powerful drug that we used to treat depression and anxiety. unfortunately it usually takes four to six weeks to start working. four to six weeks? i fell back against the couch. there are some potential side effects, she continued, and then she began to list them to be a dry mouth, headache, decreased sexual desire, night sweats, anxiety. did she really just say anxiety? it was like telling a drowning person to take one more big gold of water. my eyes filled with tears again. i don't know if i can do this. if i get more anxious i will spontaneously come thus. we can start you on a very low

dose, she said ignoring my hyperbole to be at apparently i wasn't her craziest patient. you can work up to the full therapeutic dose slowly into ant will memorize the side effects but you won't get the benefits until you reach the full therapeutic dose. each time she said the word full therapeutic dose she slowed down and mmc gate at each word with reference which made me think of a catholic priest making the sign of a cross. i will write you a prescription for ativan as well. she swiveled back to her computer and started typing that prescription as if the matter were settled. you can take it every four hours to minimize the anxiety symptoms, she said over her shoulder. once you have adjusted people take you off of the ativan. well i got what i came for. i decided to trust doctor light area to she had been right about the class and she obviously knew what she was doing, which made one of us.

when i got home that afternoon, i emptied my little white paper bag of medication on the paper to the coat table as if i had been out trick-or-treating. see, i held up the bottles to show brian. i've got my uppers and my downers. just like elvis, he observed. all you are missing is the peanut butter and banana sandwich. that's where i'm going to stop. so, obviously i'm fine now, hopefully it's obvious, but i won't tell you what happens after that. you will have to read the book. i think now would be a good time to answer any questions that anyone may have. and there's a microphone in the back. and if there are no questions, we can --

>> d. want to do that -- think you. >> i'm curious how your children related to you during that period because that must have been scary or difficult coming and how did you work through that part of it? >> out of my kids really? by the way, i am working now so it's not like i stopped forever. it's funny in the early days when i first stopped working it was a total crisis. i wasn't functional, really, and it's amazing how the village kind of appears sometimes when you need it. we didn't have any family around to help, but suddenly my aunt was flying out from the other side of the country and she stayed with us for that first week and friends just came out of the woodwork bringing meals and taking the kids out on the weekend, so i don't know that my kids noticed a whole lot.

and i would like to think that that's a testament to how hard my husband and i were both trying to kind of keep it all together for them. and i think that this is something that gets lost a lot is that we are so busy working and raising families and taking care of other people and we don't realize how much it is hurting us to not be taking care of ourselves. >> i'm a little surprised that this hasn't generated a business opportunity of an industry to sort of take care of errands. >> it has. but the whole part in the book about it. >> okay, so if you have enough money you can hire somebody to go and fix your car for you and get the laundry done and -- pick

up your groceries, full of your laundry, run your errands, by your mother's day cards for your mother. i mean come it's amazing what you can pay for so that you can work more, but a lot of people cannot afford that, so it's not a solution for most of society, right. >> another question is that sometimes people find themselves in a sort of rock and a hard place. supposing that you were the sole care of health insurance for your family and you were going nuts, but your kids wouldn't get your shots -- their shots if you didn't work. >> that is an excellent point that i am not an advocate for women not working. i actually think that when work works out right, families and society tend to be more stable when both parents can work or single parents because there are a lot of single parents raising

family and they are the sole support. but i also think we have to recognize that we can't do everything without some kind of support, and i think that my story is one example of what happens. and everyone has a different story, but mine is one example of what happens when you try to do everything and you don't have enough support. i think in my case, when i was sleep deprived and coming back from maternity leave i needed to work less for a little while and it was not an option. >> another question is what do the bosses think of all of this and i mean i worked in the health care field and i can tell you my fellow physicians had a very generous maternity leave but that's because we were extracting practically half the wealth of society in order to finance it for ourselves, but in your field maybe it's not possible to do that.

>> there is a silver lining and i think that there is a win-win and i talk about it a lot in the book, so one ray of hope for me is a program that is an acronym that stands for results only work environment and it's a management strategy that companies right now gap inc. is using it and basically what they say is this is especially pertinent to the knowledge workers. forget about time as you know it, forget about clocking in at a clocking out. we are always available anyway so who cares. forget about showing up for meetings. meetings are optional. your sole job is your employee is we are going to hold you accountable to resolve. what this does is it kind of turns the paradigm around because it means employees that are repeated at their jobs and effective and efficient end up being reworded for that and

people who are just a buzz in the chair but they are there for 12 hours a day, they are no longer reworded for just kind of showing up and companies become more profitable. there's all kind of case studies around it so that is one example, the vikings that there is a lot to be gained for the businesses figuring this out because the fact is we are not living the 1950s model anymore. we can't assume that there is an adult at home to take care of all the things associated with running a household and we have to make room for people's lives and they will be very loyal and productive workers if we figure that out. >> how many bosses are trying to figure this out? >> i don't know how to answer that. i think that to me the issue around that is people in management needs to understand that they are actually losing money by burning out their

workers and i think that that can be a hard case to make. but if you look at the research, it's true. if you look at the research, what you see is companies with more women in leadership so the companies that are able to actually maintain when an incident pushing them out of jobs like mine they actually make higher profits and they do better on the

where you talk about women sharing what is going on inside versus their exterior but it looks like it's happening and i just love that idea and i wondered kind of where you got

that and if you continue to do that and then my other question if you could talk a little bit about writing this book and what that process was like and how you put that. >> help me remember to parts of the question. the first about inside and outside there is a piece in the book where i ask when and who i know personally, i obviously know them very well to describe what is going on for them under the surface and i take them all because they are women who on the surface looks very together and professional and happy and they have lots of friends and their kids are doing great but the idea came to me because a friend of mine, a very close friend, the kind of friend where we went each other see our mass was seeing other women at school and how they don't have money problems and problems with their bosses and meanwhile her job is stagnating and she has to keep amber enough to compare her

insights to other peoples outside because the truth is we don't really know what is going on for those other women so that is where the idea came from and i asked people what was going on and it was very touching the kind of things they said. the other part was about writing the book. so, the book happened in stages. i said i quit my job but the truth is i went home sick and never went back. i just couldn't work for a while and once i got off the couch and i started eating again and wasn't crying every moment, i needed something to do and i just felt so terrible. i mean, i've heard this story from winning over and over so i know it isn't just me, it is such a come down when you have built your career and your life being a capable person and then

to run into your limits that way into the good side of that is if we all have that experience we have an opportunity to grow and become deeper people. so in my case there is a lot of soul-searching and i wrote the first draft of the memoir in like four months. it's al only did besides taking care of my kids and then i started working again and set the book aside and i actually started blogging and it was true that that i started hearing from women in every country from indonesia, argentina, canada, guatemala all over the u.s. everywhere with similar stories and they were in every industry that you could imagine. that's when i started researching the issue and then kind of carved into the book that it really is now.

did you have a question? >> i might have missed this because i walked in late. i'm wondering how did you gather the strength and the courage to get back to work. >> how did i get the strength to go back to work it's kind of like falling off a horse because the longer you don't get back on the horse you start to psych yourself out. this is the thing. i was good at my job. it's so silly that i saved my work evaluation and there are pages of how great i am and what a great manager but when i stopped working it like it went away. my confidence was just shatter shattered. my strategy for going back -- i'm self-employed now and i have

been since i started working again. my strategy was to pick the most boring projects i could find the least glamour and only part time and i just kind of eased myself back in that way. it wasn't fun work but it was just kind of building my confidence and it was amazing. it took a really long time but there was a point i realized i totally had it back. >> in my case i feel like i'm going in the opposite direction, like i am more at ease with myself so it makes me feel like this is the right thing and i'm not in a hurry to get back. i'm not working right now and i'm not in a hurry. it kind of worries me like him i just taking it easy or is this something i'm putting on or imagining or is it true.

>> i think you need to listen to your self. there are so many people telling when in your wife is going to be ruined if you don't work and your life is to be ruined if you do work very i think it is personal. if you say this is good to me than it sounds like you are doing the right thing. >> any other questions? thanks for having me, everyone. [applause] president obama dropped into a washington dc bookstore saturday along with his daughters to do some holiday shopping. when he was asked by a reporter what he thought he said he had a long list of books for readers

ages five to 52. press reports say the purchases included the kite runner, herald and the purple crayon and a sports team. earlier in the day he sent out a tweet about the importance of supporting small businesses. the saturday after thanksgiving has become known as small-business saturday. and although conversations what did you buy? >> it is a long list but some outstanding books. i've got a book for every age group from five until 52.

okay. have a great holiday. [applause] this week fox and friends cohost brian kilmeade in george washington's secret six. the tv hosts told the story of a spy ring and six previously unknown revolutionary spies infiltrated the british ranks in new york and are credited with turning the tide of the war. this program is about an hour. >> host: this is a turkic and engrossing book.